Hello, this is Count Balrog. My actual name is ... well, my title in Classical Balrog is @%#^$@%#&@%#%@&#%#@#@. My name is not the concern of mortals. Like Noel, I was in AFT/RABT before it kicked the bucket. If any of you were there, you might remember me as Count Menelvagor. Or, if in the Yahoo group LOTR87, as Count Nikolai Vagorovich. I'm (obviously) a Balrog, a race first traduced by Tolkien, and then insulted by fandom's obsession with "wings."

There's a website (http://fredonia.teunc.org/rogsylvania/useful.php). The formatting's rather poor; fixing it is somewhere on my to-do list, somewhere after working on a weird Tolkien-worshipping academy some friends and I came up with (Noel was also involved). There's a website for that, too.

I tend to do parodies, but I'm also periodically interested in real Tolkien scholarship. I have a friend who occasionally sends articles from Tolkien Studies. Also interested in languages, history, opera, and librarianship.

I have a tendency not to use capital letters, to save on typing, RSI, etc.; so no flames, please! (You'd be surprised how often one gets flak for this.)

Oh, and I was once in one of the TORN chatrooms (#teunc), so some people might know me from there as The_Count. Balrogs rule (literally)